Thursday, February 7, 2013

ObamaTax Ka-Ching!

It seems that every day brings a new ObamaCost. Whether it's birth control convenience items, or our groceries or sky-rocketing premiums, it's the gift that keeps on taking.

So here are three more vignettes, tied together by a common theme; see if you can guess what that is:

■ "The Congressional Budget Office's just-released economic forecast for 2013 is dispiriting ... ObamaCare will cost 7 million their health insurance."

What's so interesting to me is that the various factors they cite - reduced GDP, higher unemployment and so many folks losing their health insurance - are all symptoms of the same disease, not discrete phenomena.

■ Along those same lines, the (ostensibly non-partisan) Congressional Budget Office has "quietly raised the 10-year cost of [The ObamaTax] insurance subsidies offered via the health law's exchanges by $233 billion." This brings the projected total cost to over $1 trillion over the next 10 years. Given that the initial projections were in the neighborhood of $800 billion (not exactly peanuts to begin with), how long do you think it'll be before that $1 trillion estimate gets left in the dust?

■ And, finally, from the "pass it to learn what's in it" files, comes this gem:

"[HHS Secretary Shecantbeserious] and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) talk about the gaps in the "universal coverage" requirements in the [ObamaTax] in three batches of proposed PPACA regulations."

Wait, what?

There are "gaps?" What part of "universal" don't they understand?

Oh, right, this is the gang that can't seem to get any of their numbers correct, so why would we expect them to get the underlying requirements right?

The so-called "gaps" center around the Minimum Essential Coverage requirements and exemptions (and why are there "exemptions" in the first place? Oh yeah, it's "universal"), as well as the slight problem that the IRS is essentially toothless when it comes to actually enforcing those requirements.

Sheesh.

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